February 1, 2007

The Best Things I Never Wrote: Quote of the Day #6

“There are two kinds of humor,” Molly Ivins told People magazine. One kind “makes us chuckle about our foibles and shared humanity,” she said. “The other kind holds people up to public contempt and ridicule. That’s what I do.”

Molly Ivins, who died yesterday, as quoted in her obituary in today’s New York Times, “Molly Ivins Is Dead at 62; Writer Skewered Politicians,” by Katharine Q. Seelye.

Comment by Janice Harayda:

Molly Ivins helped to embolden a generation of female journalists, of whom I am one, to write in their own voices. Donald M. Murray said in Tuesday’s Quote of the Day that “voice is the quality, more than any other, that allows us to recognize exceptional writing.” A liberal newspaper columnist whose work had a Texas accent, Ivins had one of the most distinctive voices in American journalism. You could guess that a comment came from Ivins even if her name wasn’t attached to it. That quality is becoming rarer among columnists every day. Some of Ivins’s best writing appears in Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She? (Vintage, 1992).